Yalla Yalla | Lebanese Food + Style, East London

When you’re invited to eat at a restaurant by the owners, it’s always a treat - more so if it’s somewhere you already know and love. Yalla Yalla - a distinctly stylish brand serving Lebanese street food - have three branches in London all offering fantastic mezze, mains, beer, and wine.

As with all mezze, the temptation is to order too much, gorge, and spend twenty minutes rubbing your stomach and regretting the last five hummus soaked pittas. The antidote is to order a main, be strict, and stick to a couple of sides to share. Boringly, I struggle to move from the Shawarma, having ordered the chicken and lamb in recent weeks - it’s just too good. To call this a deconstructed kebab might sound like offence, given the stigma of the dish in this country; but marinated pieces of chicken, bread, a fragrant salad, and rice are exactly what a kebab contains. This is just a seriously gourmet version.

For street food, Yalla Yalla scores highly on the healthy scale. Few of the dishes involve frying and there isn’t an abundance of red meat and cheese. The salads are pure unadulterated green stuff, the flavour coming from the use of herbs rather than dressings. Not a dish I’ve tried, but their sautéed chicken liver was named in the 100 best dishes of 2012 by Timeout magazine.

While the Soho and Oxford Street branches of Yalla Yalla are proper restaurant set-ups, the Shoreditch branch is the epitome of street food. Serving from a converted shipping container, underneath a corrugated iron lean-to opposite the very cool Boxpark, this is pure East London. It’s nice though, with cool lighting, tables, heaters, and three or four other places to eat (including Argentinian steak sandwiches and burritos) for those crazy folk who want something different.

In London it’s not always easy to spot a single restaurant in a haystack of other restaurants, but the distinct black and yellow styling definitely helps Yalla Yalla stand out, and the list of positive reviews make it one to place high on the ‘must visit’ list. The Shoreditch branch is only in its current location until September of this year. They’re hoping to find another location close by to relocate to, but if they don’t, this summer might be the last chance to experience Yalla Yalla in the East! - Nik

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